Thoughts, musings, ideas and occasionally short rants on the past, present and future of electronics entertainment

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Wash Up and Eat Properly

There's been a recent uptake in discussions regarding the cost of game development. In particular single-player story-driven experiences are, according to certain triple AAA publishers, no longer financially viable as a one-time 60 dollar charge; hence the reason we see companies like EA abandoning the market space, while other publishers (such as WB) try to cram as much DLC, loot boxes and other microtransaction driven schemes into their games as possible. Personally, I have doubts about these claims of infeasibility...it's not like any of these companies are allowing us inspect their accounting records. Sure making video games has become a much more resource intensive process than it was during the 8 and 16-bit eras, but to offset that there's a wealth of third-party development tools available, in addition to a much larger potential customer base. However, for the sake of argument let's presume that they really are in the red. I can think of three easy ways these poor publishers could get back in the black.

Rumor has it that some of EA's past games were marked on budgets equal to the amount actually spent making the game. In other words, they could have reduced the development costs of certain games by nearly 50 percent simply by dumping all the thirty second advertisements in lieu of sending some free copies out to Youtubers and Twitch streamers. It seems silly to do otherwise considering word of mouth has, for a long time, carried more weight than simple product placement. Visceral Studio, the now defunct makers of the Dead Space series, was based out of San Francisco...one of the most expensive cities in the world. When you look at companies like IBM, they have all but deserted their corporate offices in large part because it's no longer necessary to have everyone under the same roof. A variety of video games, including Kerbal Space Program as well as Ori and the Blind Forest, were made by a team scattered across the globe that coordinated their development efforts via the internet. This sort of dispersed workforce brings up the question of executive supervision. Former EA employees have gone on record saying that the company has a nontrivial number of people who get paid a lot to do very little. Reducing wasteful administrative spending though is only one part of the problem when it comes to leadership.

Asset creation is a time consuming process that needs to be channelled by a strong directorial vision. Too many games waste time and money on stuff the player doesn't notice, doesn't care about, or is thoroughly unimpressed by. When you look at games such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, or more recently Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, it's amazing what a relatively small team can accomplish. Could they have added more provided they had the time/money/people? Sure. Would it have improved the experience significantly. Not really. Some developers have a bad habit of stretching the scope of their game in the vain hope that bigger equals better. This often leads to over budget hot garbage, or titles that are trapped in an early access limbo for, seemingly, an eternity. In other words, it's better to come up with a tight concept and execute on it rather than faffing about half conceived notions of open-world games with crafting and rogue-like elements. Fun isn't going to materialize from the ether just because you keep attach more bells and whistles.

This brings me to my final point which is trend chasing. As far as I know nobody has gotten rich making Minecraft clones or Clash of Clans copycats. Worse still are flash-in-the-pan hits like Angry Birds and Farmville. Real success comes from franchises like the Soulsborne series...which, I should stress, wasn't an instant hit; Before Demon's Souls there was King's Field and before Command and Conquer there was Dune II: Battle for Arrakis. It takes time, money, effort and a few iterations on an idea to cultivate something that is both innovative and entertaining. Hitting paydirt straight out of the gate is exceedingly rare and in most cases fleeting.

Of course most businesses only see the future in terms of next quarter profits, and as such often screw themselves when it comes to sustainable profits. They can scoop whales and dolphins out of the water for awhile, but how long until that well runs dry? More importantly, where's the respect for the craft? I'm not going to climb on my high horse and claim video games are art, but at the very least they are supposed to be for the express purposes of entertaining the people who buy them...not to abuse and exploit. This is rapidly degrading into a rant so I'll wrap it up by simply saying developer harassment and death threats are not acceptable, but publishers and shareholders that push this kind of garbage need to engage in some serious introspection rather than dumping their problems on enthusiasts of the hobby.